Bascom Lamar Lunsford Mountain Music Festival (Mars Hill)

Bascom Lamar Lunsford was born here in 1882, learned fiddle from his father and ballads from his mother, and spent decades walking the isolated hollows of western North Carolina collecting what people sang. He wore a starched white shirt and black bow tie when he performed — a campaign against the hillbilly caricature, dressed like a man giving a lecture because that's what he was doing: making a case that this music mattered.

In 1928 he founded the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, often claimed as the first event to carry the name "folk festival." He ran it every year until a stroke took him out in 1965. The festival in Mars Hill, his hometown, came later — the Bascom Lamar Lunsford "Minstrel of Appalachia" Festival, held each October at Mars Hill University. It's the companion event, the homecoming, twenty minutes north in Madison County where he was born.

The music he preserved lives in the lineage: the banjo style out of western North Carolina with its rhythmic upstroke, the Child Ballads sung unaccompanied, the clog dancers who keep time without a stage. Harry Smith put Lunsford's "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground" on the Anthology of American Folk Music in 1952 — a recording from 1928 that Dylan later echoed, lifting the line about railroad men drinking your blood like wine. Lunsford sold the rights to "Good Old Mountain Dew" for a train ticket home; the soda company used his original recording as its first advertising theme.

The festival is held in October, when the leaves turn and the hollow fills with sound the way Lunsford heard it: banjo, fiddle, voices carrying the ballads forward. You go because the music didn't die with him — it's still being passed, hand to hand, the way he collected it.